The Great Dictator

The Great Dictator (1940)

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In 1938, the world's most famous movie star began to prepare a
film about the monster of the 20th century. Charlie Chaplin looked a little
like Adolf Hitler, in part because Hitler had chosen the same toothbrush
moustache as the Little Tramp. Exploiting that resemblance, Chaplin devised a
satire in which the dictator and a Jewish barber from the ghetto would be
mistaken for each other. The result, released in 1940, was "The Great
Dictator," Chaplin's first talking picture and the highest-grossing of his
career, although it would cause him great difficulties and indirectly lead to
his long exile from the United States.

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In 1938, Hitler was not yet recognized in all quarters as the
embodiment of evil. Powerful isolationist forces in America preached a policy
of nonintervention in the troubles of Europe, and rumors of Hitler's policy to
exterminate the Jews were welcomed by anti-Semitic groups. Some of Hitler's
earliest opponents, including anti-Franco American volunteers in the Spanish
Civil War, were later seen as "premature antifascists"; by fighting
against fascism when Hitler was still considered an ally, they raised suspicion
that they might be communists. "The Great Dictator" ended with a long
speech denouncing dictatorships, and extolling democracy and individual
freedoms. This sounded to the left like bedrock American values, but to some on
the right, it sounded pinko.

If
Chaplin had not been "premature," however, it is unlikely he would
have made the film at all. Once the horrors of the Holocaust began to be known,
Hitler was no longer funny, not at all. The Marx Brothers, ahead of the curve,
made "Duck Soup" in 1933, with Groucho playing the dictator Rufus T.
Firefly in a comedy that had ominous undertones about what was already under
way in Europe. And as late as 1942, the German exile Ernst Lubitsch made
"To Be or Not to Be," with Jack Benny as an actor who becomes
embroiled in the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Chaplin's
film, aimed obviously and scornfully at Hitler himself, could only have been
funny, he says in his autobiography, if he had not yet known the full extent of
the Nazi evil. As it was, the film's mockery of Hitler got it banned in Spain,
Italy and neutral Ireland. But in America and elsewhere, it played with an
impact that, today, may be hard to imagine. There had never been any fictional
character as universally beloved as the Little Tramp, and although Chaplin was
technically not playing the Tramp in "The Great Dictator," he looked
just like him, this time not in a comic fable but a political satire.

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The
plot is one of those concoctions that makes the action barely possible. The
hero, a barber-soldier in World War I, saves the life of a German pilot named
Schultz and flies him to safety, all the time not even knowing he was the enemy.
Their crash-landing gives the barber amnesia, and for 20 years he doesn't know
who he is. Then he recovers and returns to his barber shop in the country of
Tomania (say it aloud), only to discover that the dictator Hynkel has come to
power, not under the swastika, but under the Double Cross. His storm troopers
are moving through the ghetto, smashing windows and rounding up Jews (the term
"concentration camp" is used early, matter-of-factly). But the
barber's shop is spared by the intervention of Schultz, now an assistant
minister, who recognizes him.

The
barber (never named, just like the Tramp) is in love with the maid Hannah
(Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's estranged wife at the time). And he is befriended
by his former neighbors. But he and the disloyal Schultz are eventually put in
a concentration camp, and then Hynkel has a boating mishap, is mistaken for the
barber, and locked into the camp just as the barber and Schultz escape -- with
Hynkel's uniform. Now the barber is assumed by everyone to be the dictator.

In
the classic Chaplin tradition, the movie has a richness of gags and comic
pantomime, including Hynkel's famous ballet with an inflated balloon that makes
the globe his plaything. There is a sequence where five men bite into puddings
after being told the one who finds a coin must give his life to assassinate
Hynkel. None of them want to find the coin and there is cheating, but
eventually -- see for yourself. And there is a long, funny episode when the
dictator of neighboring Bacteria, Benzini Napaloni (Jack Oakie), pays a state
visit. Napaloni, obviously modeled on Mussolini, eludes an attempt to make him
sit in a low chair so the short Hynkel can loom over him. And when the two of
them sit in adjacent barber chairs, they take turns pumping their chairs higher
than the other. There is also a lot of confusion about saluting, and Chaplin
intercuts shots of the two dictators with newsreels of enormous, cheering
crowds.

In
1940, this would have played as very highly charged, because Chaplin was
launching his comic persona against Hitler in an attempt, largely successful,
to ridicule him as a clown. Audiences reacted strongly to the film's humor; it
won five Oscar nominations, for picture, actor, supporting actor (Oakie),
screenplay and music (Meredith Willson). But audiences at the time, and ever
since, have felt that the film comes to a dead end when the barber,
impersonating Hynkel, delivers a monologue of more than three minutes which
represents Chaplin's own views.

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Incredibly,
no one tries to stop the fake "Hynkel." Chaplin talks straight into
the camera, in his own voice, with no comic touches and only three cutaways, as
the barber is presumably heard on radio all over the world. What he says is
true enough, but it deflates the comedy and ends the picture as a lecture,
followed by a shot of Goddard outlined against the sky, joyously facing the
Hynkel-free future, as the music swells. It didn't work then, and it doesn't
work now. It is fatal when Chaplin drops his comic persona, abruptly changes
the tone of the film, and leaves us wondering how long he is going to talk (a
question that should never arise during a comedy). The movie plays like a
comedy followed by an editorial.

Chaplin
(1889-1977) nevertheless was determined to keep the speech; it might have been
his reason for making the film. He put the Little Tramp and $1.5 million of his
own money on the line to ridicule Hitler (and was instrumental in directing
more millions to Jewish refugee centers). He made his statement, it found a
large audience, and in the stretches leading up to the final speech, he shows
his innate comic genius. It is a funny film, which we expect from Chaplin, and
a brave one. He never played a little man with a mustache again.

And
now a memory. In 1972, the Venice Film Festival staged a retrospective of
Chaplin's complete work, with prints from his own collection. On the closing
night, his masterpiece, "City Lights" (1932), was shown outdoors in
Piazza San Marco. The lights were off, the orchestras were silenced for the
first time in more than a century, and the film played on a giant screen to
standing room only.

When
it was over, and the blind flower girl could see again, and she realized the
Little Tramp was her savior, there was much snuffling and blowing of noses.
Then a single spotlight sprung from the darkness and illuminated a balcony
overlooking the square. A little man stepped out and waved. And we cheered and
cheered.

A newly restored 35mm print of "The Great Dictator"
will play Friday through Oct. 4 at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Showtimes:
Friday and Monday-Thursday at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.; Saturday at 3 p.m., 5:30
p.m. and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 3 pm and 5:30 p.m. Reviews of "City
Lights" and "Duck Soup" are also in the Great Movies Collection.

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